Mininova shuts down all illegal torrents

Mininova, one of the bigger Bittorrent filesharing sites on the Web, has shut down every single "infringing" torrent in its index and pledged to go legitimate. All torrents have been removed, except the ones that were uploaded through its content distribution service which allows artists to put their own content up.

The decision follows a court ruling after legal action from Dutch anti-piracy brigade BREIN. Mininova has always removed torrents pointing to copyrighted material on request, but the sheer weight of new torrents being uploaded made that difficult. The court ruled that Mininova wasn't liable for the infringement of its members, but that the site needed to implement a content filter.

A number of systems were trialled, but none proved 100% effective, so Mininova took the decision to remove almost every torrent in its index to avoid the threat of fines imposed by the court - 5 million euros. It’s very unfortunate that we’re forced to take this action, but we saw no other option", Mininova co-founder Niek told TorrentFreak.

That leaves few major torrent sites still standing, but thanks to the increasingly decentralised infrastructure pioneered by the Pirate Bay after its own lawsuit, the filesharing community is still alive and well, and more difficult to tackle than ever.